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Goodwill center 'more efficient'

Thursday, October 22, 2009

By JIM KINNEY

Business writer

SPRINGFIELD - Goodwill Industries' new distribution and
light manufacturing center on Page Boulevard was a busy
place Wednesday with employees, many of them living with
intellectual disabilities, packaging "Barrel of
Monkeys" games for Hasbro Inc. and boxes of screws for
OMG Inc. of Agawam.

"This is a part of Goodwill nobody sees," said
Steven L. Mundahl, president and CEO of Goodwill Industries
of the Springfield/Hartford Area Inc. "But they are
here."

Mundahl led tours Wednesday morning of Goodwill's new
light manufacturing and distribution center at 1125 Page
Blvd. in the East Springfield neighborhood. The organization
moved there in June after more than 40 years at 205 Dorset
St.

"This is a much more efficient operation," said
Peter J. Vogian, a member of Goodwill's board of
directors.

The Dorset Street location was in a residential
neighborhood, Vogian said. It was hard to get trucks in and
out easily. It was also far from the highway. The Page
Boulevard location is just a few blocks from Interstate 291.

Mundahl said Goodwill set up a donation center on Page
Boulevard to take advantage of the more than 35,000 cars
that pass by each day. This location is not a Goodwill
store, though.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence
bought the Dorset Street location for $1,375,000. Goodwill
rents the Page Boulevard location.

The agency lost $1 million of its $3 million in state funding. It's $7 million-a-year budget is made up of about $3 million in state funding, $3 million in income from selling second-hand goods at its eight stores and $1 million from assembly and packaging work such as the games and hardware, as well as from cleaning facilities such as the new federal court house on State Street, the former federal building on Main Street and Barnes Air National Guard Base in Westfield, Mundahl said....